Adopt a JSR Program Receives Increased Oracle Backing

Some 18 months ago, recent Java Community Process inductee London Java Community members Ben Evans and Martijn Verburg were commiserating with other JCP members. They were frustrated with the lack of technical due diligence being performed and the lack of developer involvement in some JSRs. At the behest of Evans the 'Adopt a JSR' program was born. Recently Oracle has thrown some new weight behind the program.

Although Verburg describes himself as the 'Cat Herder in Chief' for the program, he is quick to point out that autonomy is encouraged as much as possible.

Verburg told InfoQ:

The program aims to bring day to day developers into the process of standardizing Java before it's too late. This greatly improves specifications and provides much needed resources to the overworked Spec Leads and expert groups.

In the past month or so the Oracle Java EE team has thrown its support behind this. Says Verburg:

The Glassfish project now has a major Adopt a JSR page for adopting many of the JEE7 specifications. We've also had several successful days with Brian Goetz and other OpenJDK folk on Java language related JSRs such as Project Lambda. IBM and Red Hat have also been great vocal supporters and provided some logistical help.

The program currently boasts about 15 international JUGs. But Verburg hopes to onboard many more in 2013 through the use of "hackday packs", packages containing a presentation, a virtual machine pre loaded with the JSR and related technology stack, and some useful activities the attendees can perform and provide feedback.

Verburg commented:

The LJC was humbled to win a couple of community awards for this program last year including the JCP member of the year award and a Duke's Choice award.

There are a number of Java EE 7 JSRs that could use your help right now including WebSocket, JSON, Caching, Concurrency for EE, JAX-RS2 and JMS2.

InfoQ asked Rahman about the dual branding of the Adopt A JSR Program as "Adopt a Java EE 7 JSR". Rahman responded:

It's not a separate initiative -- we are simply leveraging the Adopt a JSR program for Java EE /GlassFish.

Rahman says any developer can participate, there is no requirement to be a JUG leader.

There is a large wiki on the main website containing more information, mailings lists in English and Portugese and a new Issue tracker. But Verburg says that will be changing in the future as they aim to turn the site into a community portal site, similar to today's JavaFX site.

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Thanks for posting this! We do indeed see the Adopt-a-JSR program as very valuable and are happy to see that there already is increased participation from JUGs worldwide.

The GlassFish/Java EE 7 Adopt-a-JSR page is indeed nothing separate at all (adoptajsr.org is directly referenced). We simply wanted to call out the Java EE 7 JSRs available right now that folks could help with.